


For Remembrance

by DangerousCommieSubversive



Category: Macdonald Hall - Gordon Korman
Genre: Gift Fic, Kissing, M/M, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 07:28:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1296520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangerousCommieSubversive/pseuds/DangerousCommieSubversive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Getting ready to leave for college means getting ready to not see each other for some time--and there are still things that need to be said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Remembrance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ardatli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardatli/gifts).



> I wrote this some time ago as a gift for Ardatli, who sent me the Mac Hall books, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

 Boots looked at the window and sighed.

It was a good window. It had done right by him and Bruno for  _years_  now, a gateway to all kinds of fun and trouble. Like a wardrobe to Narnia, if Narnia was full of illicit midnight meals and harebrained scheming. And now…now it was the last day of school, the last day of his last year at Macdonald Hall. Two hours before his parents picked him up and then off to the University of Toronto after vacation, and then (theoretically) on to adulthood.

“What’s got  _you_  sighing like a lovesick schoolboy?”

 

Boots jumped.

Bruno was  _not_  going to Toronto.  _Bruno_  was going south, to an American university, to play, of all things, football. He’d put on about fifty pounds of muscle in the past couple of years, and that and his excellent defensive game had gotten him a number of scholarship offers—he’d picked Florida because to hear him tell it, the whole place was guaranteed to be “girls for miles.”

Not that he was the only one who’d filled out. Wilbur Hackenschleimer had gone into professional wrestling after graduating. Elmer Drimsdale, of all people, had spent the summer before Sixth Form studying botany on the Appalachian Trail and come back with muscles, a tan, and a  _mustache._  Of course he still froze up in the presence of girls, but that didn’t stop them from asking him out.

Boots shrugged. “Nothing, really. Just thinking I’ll miss this window.”

Bruno grinned. “It’s been a good friend to us, hasn’t it?”

It had  _certainly_  been a good friend to Bruno. He’d helped quite a few girls through it, over the years—he had of course utterly failed to grow any kind of mustache, no matter how hard he tried, but he still fancied himself a ladies’ man. Cathy Burton had been the first of  _many._  Diane Grant had come later. On one memorable occasion it had been both of them, with a bottle of good peach brandy they’d swiped from Miss Scrimmage. Others, too, between and after them. Plenty of others.

Boots had never brought back any girls. He’d gotten taller, but otherwise he didn’t feel like he’d changed much. Bruno was always joking about how he never dated, how somewhere out there he had to have the Boots O’Neal Harem hidden.

No harem. No girls.

Bruno shut his last suitcase, stretched luxuriously, and said, “You know, I’ll miss it here.”

Boots sighed again. “Yeah.”

“I mean, what’s life without the Fish to annoy? Or without Miss Scrimmage waking everyone up with her shotgun? Not that I’m not  _excited_  about Florida, but it can’t measure up to Macdonald Hall.”

“I wish you weren’t going so far away.”

“Getting sentimental on me, Boots?” Bruno grinned, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You’ll meet some girl in Toronto and the dam’ll finally break. You’ll forget all about me.”

Boots was silent for a moment and then said, “No, I won’t.”

“Well, it’d be pretty rude if you  _actually—_ ”

It had been an impulse. Movement without thought. Temporary insanity, right? His hand on Bruno’s upper arm, other arm around his waist and the flare of heat long-suppressed as their lips touched. Boots had never kissed anyone before, but he’d  _seen_  plenty of kissing. He knew the technique.

When he let go, Bruno blinked dizzily and said, “Is  _that_  why you never dated?”

“I don’t know. Probably?”

“ _I’m_  the secret Boots O’Neal Harem?”

Boots snorted. “Promise to write, you idiot.”


End file.
